Lest you get the wrong impression, I was in fact referring to the hemlines of the air hostesses’s skirts on Go Air! And what’s the desi touchstone for measuring that? The number of heads constantly dropping along the aisle!

Go Air has got one thing right to start with — a visually snazzy graphic style (which contrasts starkly with Air Deccan’s kindergarten-quality of graphics) and use of colours in the crew uniforms.

As far as other airline specific parameters are concerned — Go Air claims to have a 90-odd percent ontime record. (Granted, my flight took off on time) Also, drinking water is on the house.

In case you didn’t know who owns Go Air, you just have to look at the underbelly of the aircrafts — where, in glory reminiscent of swanky car-stickers in Delhi proclaiming ‘Malhotra’s’ or ‘Sunny’s’ — is emblazoned — Wadia’s! The family that owns Bombay Dyeing and one of whose scions is supposedly being dated by Preity Zinta!

Credentials established, you settle into your seat and reach out for the seat pocket in front of you. Expecting yet-another-inflight-magazine on the lines of Swagat of Indian Airlines, Jetwings of Jet Airways or Simplifly of Air Deccan, what you get is Gladrags! This ensures there are plenty of glad lads around!

While Air Deccan has given its own reasons for being able to offer tickets at lower prices, Go Air further cuts costs by providing copies of its family magazine (family owned, I mean), and that too an old dated issue. Well one argument could be that an ogle-mag has no time-stamp. Fortunately, what I get is the December 2005 issue — which means, it has the complete compilation of Miss January, Miss February all the way till Miss December. Sigh! Why are there only twelve months?

Flipping through Gladrags, I was a little conscious (apart from being cost-conscious, of course!), so could not spend more than a few seconds on a each page. Which means I had reached the back-cover (of the magazine, please) in as little as a few minutes.

Wanting to spend some time ‘reading’ typed text, the only option I had was to go through Letters to the Editor (Maureen Wadia, in case you didn’t know). And one of them was a master-piece (or should I say a master-two-piece) letter which went something like this:

Dear Editor,

Please give us…
<snip>
bikini… bikini…
<snip>
bikini… bikini…
<snip>
bikini… bikini
<snip>
Aishwarya Rai… Bipasha Basu…**
<snip>
bikini… bikini…

Yours sincerely,

(Of course, I snipped out the irrelevant words!)

Time to reach for the seat pocket of the next seat, and another issue of Gladrags…

 

** From the promos it seems Dhoom-2 or D:2 is addressing this issue :)

Came across this video a little while back — aeroplanes landing at the Princess Juliana Airport, Sint Maarten, in the Caribbean.

Some more interesting info about this airport by the beach at the official website here and Wikipedia here.
But perhaps the best consolidated resource of landing/take-off videos from this airport can be seen at the 10 daily things blog here.

And you thought after Rang De Basanti that men flinging their shirts at the sight of a jet on its runway was machismo embodied…  One of the videos in the link above will perhaps give you the female equivalent of the same phenomenon — remember it’s a tourist beach. So what would you call it — Rang De Veeru? :-p